幽玄 (Yugen): An 8th Doctor ShortTrip
by That-Other-Doctor
Summary: Relight the match. Featuring the 8th Doctor and myself, the author


幽玄 (Yugen): "Yugen is at the core of the appreciation of beauty and art in Japan. It values the power to evoke, rather that the ability to state directly. The principle of Yugen shows that real beauty exists when, through its suggestiveness, only a few words, or few brush strokes, can suggest what has not been said or shown, and hence awaken many inner thoughts and feelings."

* * *

Yugen

or

"The Day During Which I Met A Very Uncommon Man In A Very Common Coffee Shop, And The Conversation We Had"

* * *

I remember the date exactly! It was October 22nd, 2015. I was in my sophomore year in college, at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, (attempting) to get my double degree in astrophysics and creative writing. I dropped Shakespeare studies after a semester; I'd been fooling myself as to whether or not I actually LIKED stumbling through innuendo after innuendo in early modern English. Plus, the professor was rubbish, and we didn't get to sword-fight.

But I digress. I have a habit of doing that, I'm afraid. Let me know when it happens again, okay?

So . . . where was I? Oh, yes . . .

I was in college on our date of October 22nd, 2015, attending WPI. To our non-humans or variations thereof who may be recording this for posterity, WPI is located in the Central Massachusetts-ish area of the United States of America, North America, Planet Earth, Sol System, Milky Way Galaxy, Virgo Galactic Cluster, The Universe. The time was 4:30 in the afternoon. I was walking back to my dorm in Morgan Hall, desperate for a cup of peppermint tea and a peanut butter sandwich before settling down to some hard-core studying. It was raining, hard: the type of chilling rain where you think that unless it starts snowing, the entire thing's just a waste of time. That's probably why I didn't see any other students wandering around the quad as I sloshed across campus. And that's probably why, when I found the note tacked to the double doors of Morgan, it had not been removed by some overly curious liberal arts undergrad. You know what the humanities kids are like: all Poe and Doyle at heart, always curious, forever nosy.

Oh dear. Digressing again, aren't I?

Okay. The note taped to the front doors of Morgan Hall . . . my first thoughts ran along the lines of "It's probably some guy's desperate plea for a spare student ID card" or "The Greek Life lot must have run out of poster board, and had to resort to sticky notes". I was going to leave it alone, but the rain-smeared "_To Kaitlin Moore_" scrawled across the front convinced me otherwise. One, because someone had actually used the correct variation of my first name on the first attempt. Two, because I recognized the handwriting.

The note was from _him_. I knew it immediately. Besides the fact that the postage stamp was from Cairo in 1911, the contents of the note wobbled between at least six different languages. I could identify three of them. The other three were definitely alien (do eyebrow pictograms count as an alien language?). The contents of the note looked as though the writer had given himself a sugar high on Mountain Dew and started typing via "Outer-Space Google Translate" with his elbows. Which, considering _his_ antics, was probably not far from the truth.

The note, from what I could make of it, ran something along these lines . . .

* * *

_Dear Kaitlin,_

_On a scale of 1 to _Les Deux Magots_, how good are the sandwiches at the Goat's Head Restaurant? _

_5:30. Please help me decide between the pastrami on marble rye and the corn beef reuben._

* * *

That was it. No signature, no P.S., nothing. But I'd gotten the hint. And old friend from the far reaches of the universe, who I hadn't seen since I was in high school, wanted to meet me for tea and corn beef sandwiches.

Go figure.

I took Amy's student service van from campus to the town, and the bus from the end of Institute Road to the Goat's Head. No way was I walking, not with the weather, and not when I had a guy to impress.

I arrived, walked inside, and spotted him by the front window. He stood out in my viewpoint like a sore thumb. His body had changed (he mentioned he could do that), and even though I couldn't see his face from my angle, he had the same _aura_ about him. The same air of mystery.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't believe in that paranormal, pseudoscience crap. I'm studying to be an astrophysicist, after all. It's just that a tall, sad stranger, with clothes much too anachronistic for 2015, with the constant fidgety, pins-and-needles urge to get up and pace, and with a bill racked up for 14 cups of Darjeeling tea, didn't tend to blend in with the WPI engineering undergrads on Quiz night.

"Hello." I grinned and sat down opposite him, tucking my Converse messenger bag under the chair.

He pulled his head away from the foggy window. His physiognomy made me blink. Multiple times. The last time I had seen him, he'd had an entirely non-endearing face: a whacker of a nose, a smile that could terrify little children under the right circumstances, and hair like an electrocuted tumbleweed. Now, he looked like someone who'd just walked off the set of Jeremy Brett's "Sherlock Holmes". Or a really dashing Oscar Wilde.

He was wearing a white, wing-collared shirt and waistcoat, with a silk cravat and a long, bottle-green frock coat. He was thinner than the last time I'd seen him; still tall, but smaller somehow. More vulnerable. He had a pleasing face framed by a halo of slightly curled, longish brown hair. Not unlike my own, actually. His most striking feature, though, were his eyes. Bright blue, like a midday autumn sky, young and incredibly old at the same time, as if they'd seen too much too many times.

To be honest, the eyes hadn't changed that much at all.

"Hello Kaitlin." His voice was light, almost musical. Completely unlike the knee-knocking baritone of his predecessor. "I couldn't decide on a sandwich."

"So you ordered 14 cups of tea instead." I added, dryly, knowing immediately who'd be left to take care of the bill.

He pouted. "I like Darjeeling."

"And I like peppermint. That doesn't mean I drink thirty bucks of the stuff."

He had the grace to look a little embarrassed. "Everything is so expensive in this century."

"Tell me about it." I ordered a Coke Zero ($3.00), and turned my nose up at the menu. "No, scratch that. Tell the _politicians_ about it. You should see the gas prices."

He snorted, and took a sip of his lukewarm tea. "When will the people of this planet learn that to be dependent on a mineral slime just doesn't make sense?"

"Nice quote. Al Gore?" I speculated.

"No. An old . . . friend. With big hair and big teeth." He gave me a knowing wink from behind the lip of his teacup.

I raised my own Coke Zero in mock salute. "Here here."

We sat in silence for a little bit, each of us suddenly very interested in the dreggy contents of our beverages. As our quiescence started to wane into awkwardness, I sighed and drummed the tune to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the top of the linoleum table with my index finger.

"So . . . what's up, Doc?" I couldn't help it. I giggled.

His expression was hard to read. Which I suppose was a good thing, considering I'd probably die of embarrassment if he'd given me the "I-can't-believe-I-associate-with-this-species-on- a-regular-basis" glare that had always been so ready to blossom on the features of his earlier persona.

I decided an intervention was in order, to save my dignity more than anything else, "What I meant was, is there something I can help you with? You didn't strike me last time as the sort of guy prone to making random house calls."

"Perhaps I've changed." He murmured, "I ought to know; so many other things have."

I shrugged, and pointed out, "Things are always changing."

"Do people change with them?"

"Dunno. I assume so; we're always discovering new things about ourselves. And I'm speaking from the perspective of one person in one body. I guess you, personally, have to work double-overtime when it comes to coming to terms with your own identity."

"'Coming to terms'." He gave a hollow, biting laugh. "How apt, coming from someone who couldn't begin to understand. More like getting morality pounded against my skull with a sledgehammer."

Had I missed something?

His words were scathing, and a bit hurtful. I told him, "Look, there's no point in acting bitter towards me. You didn't call me here out of spite. If there's one thing I know about you, one thing that _never_ changes, it's that you always have a reason for everything."

He stopped taking such an interest in his tea leaves and fixed me with a penetrating blue stare. Face on, unhindered, I realized that he really _was_ quite good-looking, but being the focus of his gaze made my knees wobble a little. I worried, for a moment, that I had offended him.

And the one thing I really did fear was being on the wrong side of his wrath.

"Yugen." He said suddenly, breaking that interminable period of pant-wetting on my behalf.

"Never heard of him."

"Y-U-G-E-N." He spelled it out for me, "It's a Japanese word."

"Ooooooooooookay." I racked my brain for the connection. "So you called me here to play Scrabble? Sorry, Doctor, but I don't think non-English words are allowed."

To my surprise and admitted relief, he chuckled. It was a nice chuckle, not like that bitter, self-inflicted pain baloney he'd had going on 30 seconds ago.

"No. Not Scrabble. More like Apples to Apples."

"So you pick a word and I have to say the first thing that comes to mind. I'll warn you, I used to be a beast at this game." I took obvious delight in his puzzlement at my colloquialisms. I had lived in New Zealand when I was very young, but by this point my slang was pretty much Americanized. "And the word is 'Yugen'?"

"In a sense."

"It'd really help if I actually knew what the word meant. My Spanish is elementary at best. My Japanese is nonexistent."

He answered my question by delving his hand into the front pockets of his frock coat. He fished around in there for a bit, and I could have sworn I heard the sounds of things that should have _not_ been in anyone's front pocket. Filing that little puzzle away as something to worry about later, I retuned my attention to the Doctor. Finally, with a grunt of effort and a smug, satisfied gleam in his eyes, he pulled out . . .

The fortune from a fortune cookie.

Talk about anticlimactic.

You know how fortune cookie fortunes will have a supposedly-deep, intrinsic aphorism written on one side, and a 'Learn Chinese and/or Japanese' thing written on the other? Well, he had lain the language side face-up in front of me, and the word on the front of the little sliver of paper, lo and behold, was 'Yugen'.

"'Yugen'" I read aloud, "'An awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and mysterious for words.'"

I raised a skeptical eyebrow. "So I'm supposed to tell you the first thing that pops into my mind when I hear 'Yugen'?"

He shook his head, making his tawny curls **_boing_** around like springs. "No. Yugen prompted me to consider the first thing that popped into _my _head. It's the reason I'm here. It's the reason _you're_ here."

"I don't understand."

"Kaitlin, something is happening to me." He interlaced his fingers, and gave me that stare again. "It's not necessarily bad, but I don't think it's good, either. I'm so old now, older than you or anyone else can even begin to comprehend. And I've seen so much. Too much, burdens and pains which no man should have to bare. And I think, as a defensive mechanism or due to my own arrogance, I am loosing the ability to _feel_ like you do, to come to terms with that pain."

"The reason why I came here is because when I first met you, when we ran and tumbled and soared through time and space, when I gave you a mere glimpse of what lay out there in the vast expanses of eternity, your response to it all was to do nothing but stand there with a childish grin plastered across your face, completely cloth-eyed!"

I could feel the blush creeping up into my cheeks, getting hot and sticky.

He continued, "I asked you what in the name of Raxacoricofallapatorius were you doing standing there smiling like an imbecile in the midst some invasion or other. I forget the details. Except . . . except that you answered me with, 'Why wouldn't I be smiling? I'm in the most amazing place in the universe.' That's all you said. Simple, mundane even. But it was the most important thing I had ever heard in all my lives."

"I hadn't meant it to be." I said weakly.

"But that's the whole point!" He smiled tearfully, "You could _see_ it! You experienced Yugen, there, on my TARDIS, and you didn't even know it! That's why I came back. I need you, Kaitlin. I need some sliver of hope. I need you to _see _that which I can't anymore. I need to _feel _again."

"But you can feel!" I exclaimed, "Look at you, running around and saving people and doing amazing things. Fighting the good fight because that's what you believe in! And you can care about people, too! I've seen you! Last time we met, there was a woman with you. You and her were thick as thieves, partners in crime, inseparable. Her name was Sarah, wasn't it?"

Suddenly, his euphoria crashed. Suddenly, he looked tired and drawn and brittle, like skeleton dust. Suddenly, he was sad again.

I knew, then, that I had hit on the real reason I was having this conversation, in a sandwich place, on a rainy evening in Massachusetts.

"What happened?" I asked quietly.

"She left." He sighed, "Well, to be politically correct, I forced her to leave. She didn't want to go. She would have stayed with me forever, given the choice."

"Did you like her?"

The question took him by surprise. "Well, it didn't really have anything to do . . ."

I interrupted before he could change the subject. "I'm asking you. Did you like her?"

"Like her?" He smiled, "She was the most amazing human being in the whole universe."

"Then why did you make her leave? It doesn't add up."

"I had to. It was going to be a bad day, and whatever fate I was to suffer, she didn't have to suffer it with me. Oh, I cushioned the goodbye with rules and Time Lord ordinances and a jumble of white lies, but I really just wanted her to be safe." He paused, thoughtful and regretful, "It was the end of the line for her and me. The last hoorah."

"If you really care about someone, there's no such thing as 'the end of the line'. Did you go back and visit? Send a postcard?"

"No."

I gaped at him. "Why on earth not? She probably thinks you dumped her! _Abandoned _her!"

"Don't you dare." He snapped.

"Well, if you came here to ask my opinion, you're flippin' going to get it!" I leaned forward in my seat, speaking quickly and earnestly because I was afraid he'd try to stop me, "Look, you and I are pretty different. I would be insulting you if I were to even _try_ to compare myself to you. You're brilliant, wise, funny, clever, and good to the core. And I'm only human. I'm not special, I'm not important. I'm a nerd with a weird sense of humor and an obsession with _Star Trek_. But I do know something: you really _are_ thick when it comes to understanding people. You send someone away, without another word, without a backward glance, and the first thing they think is that you don't care about them enough to take the time and energy to say goodbye properly. I know I would. Any human would."

He was silent, running his finger around the rim of the now-empty teacup in quiet contemplation. My twitchy finger began to tap out the beats of Queen again.

"What does love feel like, Kaitlin?" He asked me, after what must have been minutes worth of utter silence.

I gave a small facial shrug. "I wouldn't know. I've never been in love."

"If you don't know what it feels like, then how can you tell whether or not you've ever experienced it?"

Had me there. "Well, you'd know, wouldn't you? There'd be some sort of feeling, some sort of click."

"I told an old . . . friend, of sorts . . . that love was caring about someone more than you care about yourself."

"That sounds rather nice. A bit idealistic, but nice all the same."

"Why idealistic?"

"Because anyone who cares about anyone else more than themselves in an idiot." He gave me a blank stare. I continued, "_You_ should be the most important person to _you_. Because if you don't hold yourself in the highest priority, then how will you ever know when anything happens? If you aren't in touch with your feelings, if you're always miserable because you couldn't be bothered to take the time to make yourself happy, then how will you ever know when love comes along? How can you reciprocate love when you can't feel it for yourself?"

"I think love is like a box of matches. They offer warmth in the cold. They offer protection in the dark. They offer beauty when none can be found. And if you burn them too quickly, if you keep relighting the wicks in panicked haste for fear of the dark and the cold, before you know it, the matches are gone and you cannot get them back. You have to make the matches last. Conserve them, nurture them, and take care of them. The way you treat the flame of the match is just as important as how you treat the box of matches itself, just as how you treat the one you love is just as important as how you receive and cherish the love he or she gives you."

I was rushing my words by the end, and perfectly aware of how silly they really sounded. One of my neighbors, when I was younger, used to call me a prophet because I'd try to make everything I said sound all posh and noble. I guess nothing had changed in ten-something years! I could feel my blush deepening, but the look on the Doctor's face was anything but laughable.

"You know, Kaitlin." He fixated on me. "I think you know exactly what love is."

"Oh. That's good!" I grinned, "Now I know what I'll be looking for!"

He laughed a deep, rich laugh that set my heart aglow. It was a nice reprieve from the chilly evening.

"I think I fell in love." He said very simply.

"With whom?"

"Her name was . . . The Girl Who Never Was."

I decided not to pry. Just based on the way he said those few words, I felt years worth of wasted time and regret hanging about his body like a fog.

"And then I found another. She and I were forced together, but I looked after her, took care of her. Let's face it, she took care of me more times than not! But . . . she died in the end."

I clasped my hands to my mouth. "I am so sorry."

"There's nothing to be done now." He replied, his voice singing with unspoken grief. "I am a Time Lord who watches people come and go, love and hate, wither and die, whilst I do nothing but feel my hearts break."

I didn't know what to say, because it was then that he held his head in his hands and began to cry. It was barely audible, but I could see the tears leaking between the cracks in his fingers and dripping onto the linoleum tabletop.

"Oh jeez." I whispered to myself. I did the only thing I could think of: I got up out of my chair, walked over to my aching companion, and wrapped my arms around him. I knelt and rested my head on his shoulder, rubbing his back like my mom used to do whenever I needed a good cry back home. And if there was one thing I was sure of: the Doctor definitely needed a good, long cry.

The lady at the counter glanced at us briefly, but kindly let us be. I shot her a grateful smile, continued to look after my friend. I didn't say anything to him, just hugged him for a while. For that stretch of time, I didn't feel like an ignorant earth girl anymore, and he didn't feel like the high-and-mighty Time Lord with the universe at his command. He didn't feel thousands of years old and brilliant beyond my imagining. He felt like a boy; a very sad, very lost boy who had hid his tears away for far too long.

"It's okay to cry a little sometimes, Doctor." I told him quietly. "It's okay to grieve."

"Pain doesn't make you weak, Doctor. Pain doesn't make you less heroic or less powerful. Pain makes you human, and pain is what allows you to love. Because while the matches provide light and warmth, they can burn your fingers when the fire runs down and out. The true test of love is in finding the strength to ignore your stinging fingers and relight another match, to keep the flame going. To create your Yugen again.

* * *

"Because that's all love and life and happiness is really, Doctor: emotional responses too deep and mysterious for words."


End file.
